Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | F | Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women's Studies Resources

Professional Reading.

Article Excerpt
Lesley S. J. Farmer, LIBRARIANS, LITERACY AND THE PROMOTION OF GENDER EQUITY. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005. 182p. $45.00, ISBN 978-0786423446.

In 1989, shortly after the ALA Presidential Committee on Information Literacy issued its final report, (1) which transformed the mission of many school and academic library instruction programs, I attended a meeting of a faculty committee for undergraduate education to advocate for the integration of information literacy into the freshman curriculum here at the University of Wisconsin--Madison. At one point early in my presentation, I heard a faculty member groan and say--only slightly sotto voce--"Oh God! Not another literacy!" I hastily changed my choice of words, although not my argument. His groan would, no doubt, be much louder today were he asked to consider the literacies identified by Lesley Farmer in Librarians, Literacy and the Promotion of Gender Equity as being critical to the educational success of twenty-first-century students.

Farmer's book is ambitious in its intention. Its stated focus is "on librarians and their role in fostering gender equity for 21st century literacies," which Farmer identifies as technology, reading, information, numeracy, visual, aural, and media literacy (p.3). After two introductory chapters that endeavor to give an overview of the ways in which gender affects learning, along with some of the "big picture" issues involved in designing a curriculum that takes into account gender and technology, each of the following chapters tackles a separate literacy. As outlined in the introduction, each chapter is supposed to include a definition of that chapter's literacy and an exploration of current issues related to teaching and learning that literacy. Each chapter is also supposed to explain the ways in which these issues are affected by both gender and technology and to offer suggestions for ways in which librarians can help students of both sexes develop competencies for that literacy. Each chapter concludes with exercises for K-12 students and a bibliography. Following the chapters on individual literacies, the book itself concludes with a chapter on the interdependence of literacies and an extensive bibliography. (2) While the intended audience is K-12 librarians, academic librarians also will find much useful information in this book.

The strength of the book's content is its exploration of the individual literacies and the gender issues related to these literacies. Farmer pulls together a rich mix of research culled not only from the fields of librarianship, education, and gender studies but also from other disciplines such as communication arts, media studies, cognitive psychology, and human physiology. She defines each literacy in terms of its key components, its competencies, and its standards. Much of her focus is on specific gender issues that need to be addressed by classroom teachers and/or librarians when helping students develop those competencies. For example, Farmer provides an extensive...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!